Alexander Graham Bell is often portrayed as either hero or villain of deaf individuals and the Deaf community. His writings, however, indicate that he was neither, and was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed. The following two articles, reprinted from The Educator (1898), Vol. V, pp. 3?4 and pp. 38?44,…

This paper examines the idea that in mathematics education it is important to wean pupils off the use of informal everyday language and to privilege the use of formal technical vocabulary. I will first make some observations on the use of formal and informal language in the Dimensions transcript. The main focus of the next part of the discussion…

Throughout "Coriolanus", the third person "shall" appears primarily as a modal auxiliary: combined with another verb, it indicates the speaker's mood or attitude toward the person or thing that (s)he speaks about. This essay looks at one of the tribunes' use of "shall" in the third person and how it reveals the…

This paper examines the choice to translate plays from "Hochdeutsch" (the standard form of the German language) into local dialect in German-speaking Switzerland. It first looks at the creative process of translating for the amateur stage and then at the reasons behind the choice to translate. It argues that this choice reflects a desire…

Today, there is increasing concern about the health of "basic research", yet considerable disagreement about its definition. This paper examines the way in which the term is used in everyday practice. Drawing upon interviews with British and American scientists and policy-makers, we identify six different definitions currently in use.…

Throughout the 20th century, international communication has shifted from a plural use of several languages to a clear pre-eminence of English, especially in the field of science. This paper focuses on international periodical publications where more than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in…

This essay attempts to answer some of the basic assumptions made about English as a global language. It is argued that such assumptions, especially those concerning political and economic power, are not sufficient in themselves to explain why English has acquired such global importance. Rather, what has greatly contributed to the possibility for…

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can vary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic…

A dearth of research has investigated the language preference of bilingual childhood populations and its subsequent relationship to reading skills. The current study evaluated how a sequential bilingual student's choice of language, in a particular environmental context, predicted reading ability in English and Spanish. The participants were…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…

This article critically reflects on the GUN CONTROL simulation (Salies, 1994a) by retaking ideas advanced by Salies (2002) and applying them to the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes in Brazil. It examines how controlled practice relates to learners' performance on the first draft in a simulation-based content unit…

Mauritius is a multilingual postcolonial island of the Indian Ocean. Although the French-lexified creole, Mauritian Creole/Kreol, is the native language of 70% of the Mauritian population, it is excluded from the education system. Kreol lacks prestige because it is seen as broken French and associated with the local Creoles, a socioeconomically…

Quantitative and qualitative data from two Irish-speaking communities in Ireland (F, a core community within the heartland of Irish-speaking Galway and B, a peripheral community on the edge of Galway city) are examined in order to investigate the role of location in language contact. The analysis of the observed linguistic outcomes based on…

This paper presents one example of moments of tension from a yearlong ethnographic study conducted in a college intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classroom (Kumagai, 2004). I define moments of tension as those moments when conflicts arise between an instructor's teaching agenda and students' learning agenda. Conducting critical discourse…

Arguing that the introduction of corpus linguistics in teaching materials and the language classroom should be informed by theories and principles of SLA, this paper presents a case study illustrating how corpus-based findings on reported speech can be integrated into a form-focused model of instruction. After overviewing previous work which…